THEATRE CHRONICLE
185
the ticket. This description, though, derogatory in intention, is perfectly
exact. That is what the play is about, and the failure of the three sisters
to get to Moscow (and indeed the whole nostalgic dream of Moscow)
is not tragic, but pathetic, touching, absurd. The play is a study of the
romantic character, and the city of Moscow is the earthly paradise, for
which no railroad company can issue a ticket, no matter how prosperous
the passenger may be. It is the illusion of happiness, nobility, and
freedom, pursued abstractly in dreams, the mirage seen in the desert
that dazzles the eyes of the thirsty traveler till he loses his bearings and
no longer remembers what his real destination was. The three sisters
rise superior to the realities of a provincial town and become its most
abject victims. Their eyes fixed on Moscow, they allow themselves to
be plundered by a vulgar sister-in-law, whose objectives are only too
real and hence readily attainable. This is the fate of all the romantic
characters in the play. The brother,
whos~
heart is set on an enormous
career in science (that is, on Fame) accepts an insignificant post on the
local school board from his wife's lover, the ineffable Protopopov. Ver·
shinin, the idealistic colonel, who talks of the beautiful world that will
come into being in two or three hundred years, is the slave of his two
little girls and of a wife who is continually embarrassing him by attempt·
ing to commit suicide. And Tusenbach, the serious little Baltic baron,
who dreams of a life of hard work in his own brickyard, is killed in a
frivolous duel by the brutal and oafish Solyony, who himself
is
acting
out a dream in which he is a character in Lermontov.
These unfortunate people are charming, but, in a certain sense, not
to be taken seriously. Morally speaking, they are all a little hollow, and
their dreams of nobility and hard work have in them an element of pre·
tense. There is an ugly scene in the third act where the sisters fail to
defend their old nurse against the bad temper of their sister-in-law, and
another painful scene in the last act, where Irina, the youngest sister,
who knows in her heart that her fiance is going off to be killed in a duel,
refuses to speak to him a final word of love. "What? What am I to
say to you?" she asks, innocently. These human failures are the true
crises of the play, and in the end it is only the eldest sister, Olga, who
by accepting against her inclination the post of head-mistress in the
school, rises genuinely superior to circumstances, for by taking financial
independence in exchange for her dream of Moscow, she is able to pro·
vide for the old nurse who has been driven out by Natasha. In Miss
Cornell's production, however, none of this is to be found: the moral
lapses of the sisters appear as aberrations or accidents; they are the
innocent victims of a villainous woman, of fate, of provincial society,
and the tragedy is, indeed, their failure to get to Moscow.
What is missed also is the comic element in the play. Chekhov's
characters are both witty and amusing, and they have, in addition, a
flickering awareness of the absurdity of their position, an inconsequent
but nonetheless real irony which raises the whole problem from the level
